Goldfish Roulette

Maya's hands were sweating. Like, actually dripping onto her denim shorts. She gripped the plastic cup of something that was definitely supposed to be fruit punch but tasted like disappointment and lies.

"You're up," said Jake, who was honestly way too hot to be hosting this kind of middle school chaos. He gestured to the dining table, where three solo cups sat arranged in a triangle. "Pick your destiny."

Destiny, apparently, came in the form of whatever random objects Jake's little sister had swiped from around the house. Because this was 9th grade, and apparently we were all still twelve.

"Just pick one already," Chloe groaned, flipping her perfectly straightened hair. She'd already gone and gotten some lip gloss that smelled like artificial watermelon. The stakes were embarrassingly low.

Maya lifted the first cup. A **dog** treat. A milk-bone shaped like a heart.

"That's Buster's," Jake said, shrugging. "He's old, he deserves the good stuff."

"Is this your way of telling me I'm a good boy?" Maya tried, and the entire table groaned. Great. Now she was the girl who flirted with the host's dog.

She moved to the second cup. There it was: a neon orange **goldfish** cracker, single and lonely like her love life.

"Wait," said Ryan, the soccer player who'd been giving her sideways looks all night. "Aren't those, like, actually good?"

"Bro, they're stale," Jake said. "My sister left them out since last weekend."

"That's foul," Maya said, but she was already grinning. This was so dumb. This entire night was so dumb, and she was so anxious about saying something wrong that she'd barely spoken, but here she was, about to eat a week-old cracker in front of the soccer team.

She popped it in her mouth. It wasn't even stale. It was somehow chewy.

"Third cup," Jake announced like he was hosting a game show instead of a pre-game get-together.

Maya lifted it. A single gummy **vitamin** shaped like a dinosaur.

"That's from my mom's health kick," Jake said. "She thinks gummy vitamins count as medicine."

"My mom thinks those are basically candy," Maya said. "I used to sneak like five of them when I was seven."

"Same," Chloe said, and suddenly they were all bonding over childhood vitamin theft, and Maya realized she'd been holding her breath for literally an hour.

The golden retriever mix, Buster, wandered in and nudged her knee with his wet nose. Maya scratched behind his ears, finally something genuine in this room full of performed casualness.

"Hey," Ryan said, sliding into the seat next to hers. "You want to get some air? Jake's sister put on tiktok songs and I can't."

Maya looked at the empty cups, the dog leaning against her leg like he'd known her forever, the way everyone was suddenly looking at her like she was actually interesting, not just the quiet girl from AP Bio.

"Yeah," she said. "Yeah, I'd like that."

Outside, the air was cool and the anxiety was still there, but smaller somehow. Manageable. Behind them, someone started laughing about something actually funny.

Maybe high school wouldn't be so bad after all.